26 Amazing Books by LGBTQ+ Authors You Should Add to Your Bookshelf

With the 51st anniversary of the Stonewall Riots coming up on June 28, it seems like the entire country is celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride. But what happens on July 1, when all the rainbow logos and flags get put away for the year? Don't worry—we've got a list of incredible books by LGBTQ+ authors to keep you occupied all year long. Like the queer community itself, this reading list is diverse and exciting, representing a wide variety of genres, time periods, and identities. Here are 26 great books to add to your bookshelf.

1. Fingersmith // Sarah Waters

Riverhead Books

Sarah Waters is the reigning queen of lesbian historical mysteries, and Fingersmith is her answer to Oliver Twist—only with more, well, twists. So-called "genre" stories rarely get recognized for major literary prizes, but Fingersmith not only won the Crime Writers Association's 2002 Historical Dagger award, it was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize that year.

2. Eighty-Sixed // David Feinberg

Grove Press

In the last few years, a host of historical novels have delved into the first wave of the AIDS crisis, from Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers to Joseph Cassara's House of Impossible Beauties. But no retrospective look captures the unknowability of the queer community's sudden descent into the plague years as well as David Feinberg's seminal Eighty-Sixed, which blends humor, fear, loss, and anger into a genuinely fun—if incredibly harrowing and sad—chronicle of the 1980s.

3. Stone Butch Blues // Leslie Feinberg

Alyson Books

Winner of the 1994 Stonewall Book Award, Stone Butch Blues is one of the earliest American novels told from the point of view of a genderqueer, trans-masculine person—a “stone butch,” in the parlance of the 1970s (when the majority of the book is set). Leslie Feinberg’s last words were “remember me as a revolutionary Communist,” and in that spirit, the 20th-anniversary edition of the book is free to download on hir website. (Feinberg used the pronouns ze/hir.)

4. [insert] Boy // Danez Smith

YesYes Books

This first poetry collection from queer, black, nonbinary Midwesterner Danez Smith shows that the best spoken word poetry can also light up the page. Showing the true breadth of their talent and appeal, in the years since [insert] Boy (2015) was published, Smith has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and won a number of awards, including a nomination for the National Book Award for their 2017 collection Don't Call Us Dead.

5. I’ve Got a Time Bomb // Sybil Lamb

Topside Press

In this whacked-out road novel, Sybil Lamb borrows deeply from her own experiences as an underground, always-on-the-move, crust punk trans artist—including the time she was beaten and left for dead after a gay wedding in New Orleans, causing her permanent brain damage. The result is surreal and disturbing, yet somehow still hopeful.

6. The Color Purple // Alice Walker

Open Road Media

The Color Purple is a timeless American classic that has won accolades in print, on film, and on the Broadway stage. Yet it's not often recognized for the queer sexuality and unconventional family structures at its heart. If you haven’t read this book since it was assigned to you in school, come back to it with adult eyes to find a beautiful story of queer resilience.

7. Sketchtasy // Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Arsenal Pulp Press

Young queer people might be prone to wax nostalgic about the 1990s (as many of us do). But Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s third novel, Sketchtasy, presents a different perspective on the decade, delving into the dangerous and confusing side of being a young queer outsider in Boston, America’s most parochial city, in the mid-1990s.

8. I, the Divine // Rabih Alameddine

W. W. Norton & Company

Rabih Alameddine’s sumptuous prose would make a to-do list mesmerizing, but the real delight of I, the Divine is its experimental structure: The book takes the form of a series of attempted first chapters of the memoir of its protagonist. Alameddine is a master of using nonlinear forms to build powerful and unexpected narratives, and I, the Divine is one of his best.

9. Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga // Michael McDowell

Valancourt Books

Michael McDowell was only 49 years old when he died of AIDS in 1999, but he was already the “finest writer of paperback originals in America today,” as Stephen King put it. Although you may not know his name, you almost certainly know some of his writing, such as the script for Beetlejuice. Blackwater is McDowell’s six-part serial Southern gothic horror epic, which follows decades of one family’s haunted life along the Perdido River in Alabama.

10. We the Animals // Justin Torres

Mariner Books

Justin Torres’s loosely autobiographical first novel follows three brothers growing up in upstate New York in the 1980s in a family that is at turns loving and violent. A beautiful coming-of-age story about being queer, brown, and working class, Torres fills his pages with gorgeous sentences that linger in your mouth, like, “We were six snatching hands, six stomping feet; we were brothers, boys, three little kings locked in a feud for more.”

11. Outline of My Lover // Douglas Martin

Soft Skull Press

Douglas Martin's exquisite, short, experimental roman a clef shines a queer light in an unexpected place: the indie music scene of Athens, Georgia, circa the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following a fey young man's limerent crush on a closeted rock star, Outline of My Lover was published by Soft Skull Press, a New York City underground institution whose earliest books were printed on pirated Kinko's copiers.

12. This Bridge Called My Back // Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua

SUNY Press

If you love the concept of intersectionality, This Bridge Called My Back is the throwback read you need. Combining everything from poetry to memoir to theory, this slim anthology is one of the ur-texts that brought an explicitly anti-racist, women-of-color-centered, feminist lens to queer studies—without being so full of academic jargon you’ll want to throw it across the room.

13. Conflict Is Not Abuse // Sarah Schulman

Arsenal Pulp

Sarah Schulman is one of the queer community's fiercest public intellectuals, with a critical eye that has tackled topics as diverse as Palestinian liberation and American gentrification. With Conflict Is Not Abuse, she examines the “supremacist thinking” that undergirds everything from our current presidential administration to that Twitter fight you got in last week.

14. I’ll Give You the Sun // Jandy Nelson

Speak

This beautiful young adult novel proves that writing for teens can be as poetic and lyrical as writing for adults—without losing the unputdownable quality that animates the best YA books. In alternating chapters, Nelson’s twin brother-sister narrators slowly circle the devastating secrets that transformed them from best friends into virtual strangers. We dare you not to cry at the end.

15. 7 Miles a Second // David Wojnarowicz

Fantagraphics Books

Following his 2018 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, the late artist and activist David Wojnarowicz has exploded back into cultural relevance. This posthumous graphic novel (illustrated by Wojnarowicz’s friend, James Romberger, and originally published by DC Comics), turns his autobiographical stories of homelessness, sexual abuse, and AIDS into a fever dream of stream-of-consciousness prose and hallucinatory images.

16. Trash // Dorothy Allison

Penguin Books

Dorothy Allison is rightly famous for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina, which drew on her experiences growing up poor, Southern, queer, and sexually abused. But the novel’s protagonists, Bone and Shannon, made their debut in this early collection of Allison’s short stories, which won multiple Lambda Literary Awards in 1989.

17. Written on the Body // Jeanette Winterson

Vintage International

The unnamed, ungendered protagonist of Jeanette Winterson’s magical novel Written on the Body is both philosopher and seducer, approaching love as a conundrum to be sorted and a prize to be won. The result is a genderless eroticism that is both intellectual and physical. This one is best read with your lover(s).

18. Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls // T Kira Madden

Bloomsbury Publishing

T Kira Madden’s lush, wild, and disturbing memoir seems to take every insane “Florida woman” internet meme and explode it, revealing the tenderness, love, fear, pain, anger, and joy that nestle within stories of crazy nights and lost days. But Madden’s lyric prose and unique voice are what truly make this autobiography shine.

19. Go Tell It on the Mountain // James Baldwin

Vintage International

James Baldwin is one of the lions of 20th-century literature, renowned for his gorgeous writing, his gripping narratives, and his ability to grapple with some of the major social issues of his time. Go Tell It On the Mountain is his first book, the one that years later he would call “the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” Start here, and then read everything Baldwin wrote after.

20. No Ashes in the Fire // Darnell Moore

Bold Type Books

Darnell Moore’s memoir of coming of age queer and black in Camden, New Jersey, is equal parts harrowing and beautiful. His ability to interweave his personal journey with the larger story of the structural racism and disenfranchisement faced by Camden residents makes No Ashes in the Fire fascinating on both a personal and political level.

21. Confessions of the Fox // Jordy Rosenberg

One World

Transgender writer Jordy Rosenberg’s stunning debut novel ping-pongs back and forth between a lost 18th-century manuscript that purports to be the true autobiography of Jack Sheppard (an infamous historical figure and thief) and the story of the beleaguered academic who finds the book in a library sale at his second-rate university. Rosenberg himself teaches 18th-century literature as well as gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and for anyone who’s spent too long in academic circles, the present-day parts of this book will feel all too realistic.

22. Dancer from the Dance // Andrew Holleran

Harper Perennial

Nothing can recreate the hothouse nature of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS urban gay male life, with its heady mix of liberation and oppression all set to a throbbing disco beat—but Dancer from the Dance certainly comes close. It’s a portrait of shallow hedonism filled with unexpected depth and pathos.

23. Leaves of Grass // Walt Whitman

Rare Book Division, The New York Public Library

If the last time you tried to read Leaves of Grass was in a high school English class, it deserves a second look. Whitman’s poems are queer, erotic, sensual, sexual, and sometimes downright dirty. As the poet himself wrote, “I am for those who believe in loose delights—I share the midnight orgies of young men.”

24. SCUM Manifesto // Valerie Solanas

AK Press

If you only know Valerie Solanas from her attempt to shoot Andy Warhol or her recent cameo on American Horror Story, you’re missing out on one of the most outrageous feminist texts of the mid-20th century. Is SCUM Manifesto a Swiftian satire of Freudian misogyny, or actual propaganda for the violent overthrow of the patriarchy? Unclear. But either way, it's hard to put down a book that begins like this:

"'Life' in this 'society' being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of 'society' being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex."

25. The Queen of the Night // Alexander Chee

Mariner Books

Like the arias sung by Alexander Chee’s protagonist—a 19th-century opera diva with a hidden past—The Queen of the Night is lush, dramatic, passionate, and melodramatic (in the best way). This book is a confection for opera queens and Francophiles, but even tone-deaf readers will revel in its murders, affairs, intrigues, and mysteries. We've previously put Chee on our list of great Asian American authors to read, so suffice it to say we're big fans.

26. Complete Poems // Marianne Moore

Penguin Classics

We might think of the terms asexual and aromantic as modern identity labels only recently recognized under the queer umbrella, but throughout history, there have been people who have lived queer lives very much in those modes—like the extraordinary poet Marianne Moore, one of the most talented (and longest lasting) of the Modernist poets of the early 20th century. Complete Poems gives readers a broad overview of her work, from her early, dense, Imagist pieces (often drawn from scientific sources, like 1936's "The Pangolin"), to her later, more accessible and popular work (like 1961's "Baseball and Writing").

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This Smart Accessory Converts Your Instant Pot Into an Air Fryer

If you can make a recipe in a slow cooker, Dutch oven, or rice cooker, you can likely adapt it for an Instant Pot. Now, this all-in-one cooker can be converted into an air fryer with one handy accessory.

This Instant Pot air fryer lid—currently available on Amazon for $80—adds six new cooking functions to your 6-quart Instant Pot. You can select the air fry setting to get food hot and crispy fast, using as little as 2 tablespoons of oil. Other options include roast, bake, broil, dehydrate, and reheat.

Many dishes you would prepare in the oven or on the stovetop can be made in your Instant Pot when you switch out the lids. Chicken wings, French fries, and onion rings are just a few of the possibilities mentioned in the product description. And if you're used to frying being a hot, arduous process, this lid works without consuming a ton of energy or heating up your kitchen.

The lid comes with a multi-level air fry basket, a broiling and dehydrating tray, and a protective pad and storage cover. Check it out on Amazon.

For more clever ways to use your Instant Pot, take a look at these recipes.

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25 Amazing Books by Asian American and Pacific Islander Authors You Need to Read

May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which celebrates the lives and contributions of inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through various mediums. In honor of the holiday, here are 25 books from Asian American and Pacific Islander authors that you should include on your reading list, from prize-winning fiction to graphic novels, essays, and memoirs.

1. The Sympathizer // Viet Thanh Nguyen

Grove Atlantic

The Sympathizer is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s debut novel, which earned him a Pulitzer Prize as well as a place on The New York Times Bestseller list. When Nguyen was 10 years old, he saw the film Apocalypse Now, an American drama about the Vietnam War, and realized that not many stories about the war came from the perspective of the Vietnamese people.

In The Sympathizer, the unnamed narrator is a South Vietnamese military aid working as a spy for the communist North Vietnamese. Born to a French father and Vietnamese mother, this unnamed spy was educated in America, but has returned to his home country to fight for the communist cause. After the Fall of Saigon, he is among the refugees sent to the United States and tries to start a new life there, but is quickly recruited back to spy on his fellow comrades. The Washington Post has called the novel “startlingly insightful and perilously candid.”

2. Pachinko // Min Jin Lee

Grand Central Publishing

Pachinko is a historical novel that follows four generations of a Korean family that migrates to Japan, following a large ensemble of characters who must deal with the legal and social discrimination they face as immigrants. In order to move up in society, the family opens up pachinko parlor, a slot machine style game popular in Japan, from which the book takes its name. Beautifully written and captivating, Pachinko was named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by The New York Times and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.

3. Little Fires Everywhere // Celeste Ng

Penguin Random House

Set in the 1990s, Little Fires Everywhere tells the intertwined stories of the Richardsons, a middle-class suburban family in Shaker Heights, Ohio—where author Celeste Ng grew up—and single mother Mia Warren and her daughter Pearl. While Mia is a transient artist with a mysterious past, the Richardson household follows a strict set of rules and status quo. When the two families find themselves on opposing sides of a custody battle over the adoption of a Chinese baby, secrets are revealed and lives are changed forever. In the process, Little Fires Everywhere explores the power of privilege and the societal demands on motherhood.

4. Clay Walls // Ronyoung Kim

Permanent Press

The Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel Clay Walls tells the story of a Korean family forced to leave Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1920s to live in the United States. As Pachinko author Min Jin Lee recently described it to Bustle, “Clay Walls is a story about immigration and colonial trauma, and it is also a story about marriage, class, and patriarchy." Published in 1986, the book was the first-ever American novel to explore the social and cultural situations of Korean immigrants in the early 20th century, and had a major impact on later generations of Asian-American authors. "At the time, I did not think I could be a writer, so I did not read it as a lofty literary example," Lee told Bustle, "rather, I read it and loved it because it was a beautifully written work of American literature that was both absorbing and deeply felt.”

5. The Namesake // Jhumpa Lahiri

Mariner Books

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake brings the immigrant experience and the idea of identity to light in this story of the Ganguli family leaving Calcutta for the United States. After their arranged marriage, Ashoke and Ashima move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Ashoke’s career in engineering. As Ashoke adapts to the American way of life, Ashima resists the lifestyle and pines to be back home with her family. The story then follows their son Gogol as he struggles between following his family’s tradition or assimilating to U.S. culture—an experience that many first-generation American children deal with.

6. Girls Burn Brighter // Shobha Rao

Flatiron Books

Set in India, Shobha Rao’s debut novel follows Poornima and Savita, friends who are born in an impoverished landscape where they endure daily abuse. They are separated after a devastating assault on Savita. Poornima becomes determined to find her friend and leaves everything behind. Her journey takes her to the dark underworld of India and then to a tiny apartment in Seattle, Washington. Girls Burn Brighter is a timely—if distressing—portrayal of human trafficking, sexual assault, misogyny, cultural patriarchy, and the power of friendship.

7. I Love You So Mochi // Sarah Kuhn

Scholastic

In this coming-of-age story for young adults, Kuhn explores themes of food, fashion, family, cultural differences, and love. The sweet romantic comedy follows Kimi Nakamura as she visits her estranged grandparents in Japan during spring break after getting into a fight with her mother. While there, Kimi meets Akira, a cute medical student who moonlights as a Mochi mascot, and he ends up serving as her guide in Kyoto. What begins as an escape from her problems becomes a way for Kimi to understand her mother’s past and figure out her own future.

8. The Woman Warrior // Maxine Hong Kingston

Penguin Random House

Told across five interconnected stories, The Woman Warrior blends autobiography and Cantonese mythology to explore Kingston’s identity as a first-generation Chinese American woman. Kingston focuses on the women that have affected her life the most—from her aunts to her mother to the Chinese folk hero Fa Mulan and finally to Kingston herself. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, The Woman Warrior has become a staple in Asian American Studies classes since it was first published in 1976.

9. Pidgin Eye // Joe Balaz

Joe Balaz

If you want to learn about Hawaiian culture, start with Joe Balaz, a Native Hawaiian poet and visual artist best known for his writing in English and Pidgin (Hawaiian Creole English). His collection Pidgin Eye features 35 years of poetry honoring the beauty and complexity of Hawaii and its people. Balaz’s poems are funny, spiritual, and full of Hawaiian history.

10. All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir // Nicole Chung

Catapult

This memoir by Catapult magazine editor-in-chief (and former managing editor of The Toast) Nicole Chung is a warm and honest reflection on the author's search for the birth parents who gave her up for adoption. After asking her adoptive mother about her birth parents, Chung is told that they could not give her the life she deserved and that "may be all you can ever know." As Chung prepares for the birth of her first child, she seeks out her birth parents and finds an older sister as well as some painful family secrets. All You Can Ever Know was a finalist for the 2018 National Books Critics Circle Award and named a Best Book of the Year that year by The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, and many more.

11. Language of the Geckos and Other Stories // Gary Yong Ki Pak

University of Washington Press

Writer Gary Pak is considered one of the most popular and influential writers of Hawaiian heritage of the modern era. Many of his stories focus on Asian-Hawaiian identity and the complexities of Hawaiian culture. Language of the Geckos and Other Stories features stories of Native Hawaiians and Asian Americans (as well as haole, or white people) dealing with unfulfilled dreams, failure, and the loss of love.

12. Patron Saints of Nothing // Randy Ribay

Penguin Random House

In this young adult novel, author Randy Ribay dives deep into Filipino and American identity, drug abuse, guilt, grief, and the unjust policies of current Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte. After the death of his cousin at the hands of the Duterte regime, Filipino American Jay Reguero is determined to find out what happened. Jay travels to the Philippines, where he finds out more than he bargained for.

13. The Astonishing Color of After // Emily X.R. Pan

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

After her mother dies by suicide, Leigh is convinced her mother has been reincarnated as a red bird. She travels to Taiwan to meet her mother’s parents for the first time, and while there, she seeks out her mother’s past, uncovers family secrets, and build a new relationship with her grandparents. At the same time, Leigh must come to terms with her relationship with her best friend and longtime crush, Axel, whom she kissed for the first time the day of her mother’s passing. Pan explores mental illness, grief, and love in this heartbreaking story.

14. Edinburgh // Alexander Chee

Picador

Alexander Chee’s semi-autobiographical debut novel is about a boys’ choir in Maine and the sexual abuse its members suffer at the hands of their choir director. The harrowing tale of sexual abuse, resilience, and redemption is guaranteed to leave a powerful impact. In fact, its publication helped prompt Chee to enter therapy for the first time.

15. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before // Jenny Han

Simon & Schuster

Whenever Lara Jean has a crush on a boy, she writes a letter to him telling him how she feels, but she doesn’t send the letter. Instead, she seals and locks them away in a box under her bed. One day, Lara Jeans discovers that these letters have been mailed out, meaning all the boys she’s ever had crushes on received them, including her sister’s ex-boyfriend, Josh. In this debut novel (recently adapted into a hit Netflix film), Jenny Han writes beautifully about the importance of sisterhood, falling in love, and finally taking some risks in life.

16. Marriage of a Thousand Lies // SJ Sindu

Penguin Random House

In writing Marriage of a Thousand Lies, SJ Sindu wanted to explore a topic that isn't typically talked about in South Asian American fiction—queer identity. The novel follows Lucky and her husband, who are both gay, and lying to their Sri Lankan families about it. After Lucky’s grandmother suffers an accident, Lucky returns to her childhood home and reconnects with her first love, Nisha, who is preparing for an arranged marriage with a man she’s never met. Throughout the book, Sindu tackles what it means to be queer and South Asian American.

17. Internment // Samira Ahmed

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Inspired by the uptick in anti-Muslim hate crimes and Islamaphobic rhetoric in the United States that followed the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Samira Ahmed's Internment imagines a not-too-distant future in which Muslim American citizens are rounded up and forced into internment camps. In this timely novel, Layla Amin and her family are forced into one of these camps in the California desert. Layla is determined to take down the system, leading a revolution inside the camp.

18. The Kiss Quotient // Helen Hoang

Penguin Random House

Helen Hoang’s 2018 debut novel, The Kiss Quotient, is about Stella, a math genius with Asperger’s who isn’t great at intimacy and relationships. This is why she hires an escort, Michael, to teach her a thing or two about sex. Of course, it doesn’t take long for them to realize their relationship is more than just what happens inside the bedroom.

19. Where Reasons End // Yiyun Lee

Penguin Random House

Where Reasons End takes the form of a painful and honest conversation between a mother and a son. Written after the death of her own son by suicide, Yiyun Lee creates a space between life and death where the narrator and her son talk about memories, grief, love, and longing. The novel is a stunning exploration of grief and loss that is likely to leave you in tears.

20. The Leavers // Lisa Ko

Workman Publishing

Lisa Ko was inspired to write The Leavers after reading a 2009 New York Times article about an undocumented Chinese immigrant in America [PDF]. Several years after sneaking into the United States on a boat from China, this woman tried to bring her son to the U.S. to join her. But he was caught by authorities while trying to cross the border from Canada and placed into the Canadian foster care system, where he was adopted out to a Canadian family. The Leavers tells the story of Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant who disappears, leaving her 11-year-old son Deming all alone. He is eventually adopted by a white couple and is left to wonder where his place is in the world. Ko’s powerful debut was National Book Award finalist in 2017.

21. American Born Chinese // Gene Yuen Yang

Square Fish

Winner of the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, Gene Yuen Yang’s graphic novel American Born Chinese weaves together three seemingly independent stories of Chinese folklore, self-acceptance, and cultural assimilation. Told through the eyes of Jin Wang, an all-American white teen named Danny, and the Chinese folk legend the Monkey King, Yang breaks down the insecurities of growing up Chinese American and dealing with issues of identity and self-worth. While the three stories seem unrelated, they are later revealed to be connected in a surprising twist.

22. America is Not the Heart // Elaine Castillo

Penguin Random House

Elaine Castillo examines today’s suburban Filipino migrant community in this ode to Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 tale America Is in the Heart. Castillo's America Is Not the Heart tells the story of Hero, a former doctor from the Philippines who immigrates to the United States after joining the New People’s Army, an insurgent Communist guerrilla group, and being disowned by her immediate family. Living with her uncle’s family, Hero is slowly coming to terms with what happened in her past with the help of her cousin, a potential love interest named Rosalyn, and the Filipino-American community.

Considered unlucky by her family after her mother dies giving birth to her, Adeline Yen Mah tells her Cinderella story in Falling Leaves. Her father remarries a beautiful yet cruel woman. Yen Mah and her siblings are mistreated, but Yen Mah takes the brunt of the cruelty. Determined to get away, Yen Mah works hard to be an exceptional student and is eventually allowed to study medicine in England. She later finds success and happiness in the United States, but must return to China after the death of her father and deal with her wicked stepmother once again. The Washington Post called the story of family cruelty and resilience “painful and lovely, at once heartbreaking and heartening,” leaving the reviewer to wonder how Yen Mah survived to tell the tale.

24. Somewhere Only We Know // Maurene Goo

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

A contemporary take on the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, Somewhere Only We Know tells the story of Lucky, a popular Korean pop star who, after playing a big concert in Hong Kong, escapes her handlers in search of a hamburger. High on anti-anxiety medication and sleeping pills, she encounters Jack, a tabloid reporter looking for his next story. Together, they travel around Hong Kong and begin to fall for each other, but both are keeping their own secrets. Goo immerses the readers into the world of K-pop and life in Hong Kong and captivates us with her witty banter and charming story.

25. It’s Not Like It’s A Secret // Misa Sugiura

HarperCollins Publishers

In this YA romance, teenager Sana Kiyohara is dealing with a lot—her mother’s subtle racism, her father’s infidelity, and her crush on a friend who happens to be a girl. The coming-of-age story tackles the intersections of identity, racism, cultural expectations, and coming out, and author Misa Sugiura doesn't hold back.

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